


Family Recipe

by persnickett



Category: Live Free or Die Hard (2007)
Genre: Community: sexy_right, First Kiss, Fluff, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-31
Updated: 2012-10-31
Packaged: 2017-11-17 11:13:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/550943
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/persnickett/pseuds/persnickett
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Matt didn't want to call Holly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Family Recipe

Matt didn’t want to call Holly. He really, really didn’t want to call Holly but he was pretty sure he was in over his head.

 

Talking to Holly wasn’t that high on Matt’s list of Fun Things to Do, even on a good day. In fact it was pretty permanently situated somewhere below getting his ass mercilessly handed to him courtesy of Lucy at Tekken, but just above root canals and being shot in the kneecap by Thomas Gabriel.

 

And today, as it happened, was _not_ a good day. Today was a day that Matt would go so far as to call a _bad_ day. Not apartment-exploding, helicopter-crashing, digital apocalypse, kneecap bad, but pretty FML-worthy none the less.

 

More specifically, today was the kind of day where you got into your first real fight with your …roommate. Okay, ‘guy you were temporarily crashing with’. ...Fine, ‘dude who semi-recently saved your pathetic life a whole lot of times, and was now the only reason you had a place to actually live it in’.

 

AKA the dude who was generally your literal saviour in every possible way, and you had pretty much given up on kidding yourself you didn’t have a big, hopeless, hero-worshippy, unrequited schoolboy crush on.

 

Yes, today was the kind of day you were just patching up the last holes in a week and half’s worth of coding – eyes burning, and carpal tunnel flipping you the proverbial bird – when aforementioned dude stormed into your room. There was probably some stomping, and slamming of a few things, and the announcement that there would be ‘no music with lyrics about burning crosses in this house’ followed by the decree that you were to ‘turn that disrespectful shit off’.

 

It might have also been the day that Matt replied that maybe McClane should try listening to the _rest_ of the lyrics before he busted in on people, all judgement and raining brimstone. People who had their door closed. Because closed doors were supposed to shut out noise. Because there were other people who deserved respect, and privacy, in this house. Because they were _working_.

 

And Matt might have also childishly taken a page out of a certain CCR-blasting cop’s book and turned the speakers up a couple of notches, even though his head kind of hurt. And when that didn’t make either McClane or his headache disappear any faster, he might have taken the need to make himself heard over _Rage Against the Machine_ as an excuse to raise his voice.

 

Then some things might have been said that Matt didn’t entirely remember, beyond the fact that they were said _really loud_. He did distinctly remember expressing that not absolutely everything that was created after 1972 was totally useless. That McClane might figure out that he actually _liked_ some of it if he ever just gave it a goddamn chance.

 

Then there was John, straightening up and looking at him like he might be catching onto the fact that _Matt_ was a thing that was created after 1972…

 

Which was of course the moment that things got (relatively) quiet and McClane _did_ hear the lyrics, and suddenly Matt realized suggesting that John McClane, or any New York cop, or maybe just any cop ever, should really listen to the [lyrics to ‘Killing in the Name’](http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/rageagainstthemachine/killinginthename.html) possibly wasn’t the best idea.

 

Next came the part where Matt reached out and clicked off the volume before McClane did something like rip the plug out of the wall and lose him three days’ worth of work. Then the obligatory excruciating silence.

 

The kicker though, was probably his mouth – and its unfortunate habit of getting several steps ahead of his brain’s ability to tell it to shut the hell up – seemingly being unable to resist the irony of attempting to fill that silence by sullenly muttering the next line.

_“…And you do what they told ya.”_

 

And now John was upstairs, bedroom door slammed resolutely shut, and Matt was here. In the kitchen. Leaning over a pot of boiling pasta until the steam made his hair dampen and cling to his forehead, and his cheeks feel like they were glowing like an LED display, while he poked at the big, flat, rubbery-looking noodles and tried to remember if the recipe had said anything about how in the hell you knew when they were done.

 

This recipe, as far as he understood, had been John’s mother’s, and was his favourite. A home-cooked meal was also, if Matt’s intel was correct, the fastest route back into McClane’s good books.

 

Holly had handed him this recipe after a decidedly uncomfortable Christmas dinner, at which Matt hadn’t been entirely sure whether he was there with Lucy, or there with John.

 

To help matters along, John came from a generation that obviously dressed up for family dinners. He had been wearing a shirt with an actual collar on it, and had put on a sort of cardigan over that. It should have looked ridiculous – John McClane in a Ward Cleaver style fucking _Christmas sweater_ – but the fact was it looked…nice.

 

The way it set off things like John’s chest, and shoulders, and the colour of his eyes was _nice,_ and whenever the hell had ‘nice’ become Matt’s thing, anyway? The knit itself looked nice too, soft…and expensive. Cashmere maybe, and if Matt had his guess, he’d say it was probably an old gift from Holly. Which made Matt’s reaction all the more classic, really.

 

The whole situation was an all-round Suck-fest of Awkwardness. The star attraction featured one Matthew J. Farrell’s evening-long struggle to find places to put his eyes, and his hands for that matter, that would demonstrate to John how said hands never went anywhere near the general vicinity of his daughter –while simultaneously keeping said eyes off the goods in front of John’s ex wife.

 

A task which, if Lucy was any indication, he had done a pretty shit job of –as evidenced by her cornering him in the hallway, pinning him with a smirk and a mind-piercing laser-beam gaze that apparently turned out to be genetic, and suggestively drawling “soooo, Farrell…gonna be giving my dad anything _good_ for Christmas?”

 

Well at least they’d solved the mystery of who he was there with.

 

On their way out the door, Holly had insisted on ‘welcoming him to the family’ instead of simply saying ‘goodbye’. She had kissed him on the cheek while sliding the tightly folded little square of paper into his palm like she was slipping the bouncer at _Bantam_ a twenty. Then she said, “in case of emergency” and patted him on the shoulder, with a distinctly sympathetic look in her eye.

 

At the time, Matt had thought she’d just had a little too much eggnog.

 

Now that he’d pieced the two moments together in his mind however, he was beginning to suspect what Holly had had, was a little too much gossip from Lucy. Or maybe jumping to wild and completely unfounded conclusions was genetic too.

 

It was ridiculous. And typical. Just because he was an openly bi guy, living with another guy, it didn’t automatically mean there had to be Something Going On. Which there was not. No matter how hard Matt might wish on every star, in every galaxy, far far away or otherwise.

 

Okay yes, it was probably just harmless teasing. The trouble with that was, Matt had a pretty fertile imagination, and any hint, from people who would theoretically know best, that McClane was anything less than 100% arrow-straight had a distressing tendency to kickstart it into leaping to some highly unfounded conclusions and conjectures of its own…and Matt had to live with the man.

 

Preferably without spending a greater percentage of time than strictly necessary locked in his bathroom with a copy of Hustler.

 

Therefore: Every time one of them said something to that effect, Matt had to spend a good couple of days of mental re-programming reminding himself that their very existence was evidence that McClane was marriage-and-not-one-but-two-kids straight, straight, straight.

 

Plus, Matt knew from experience the unfortunate effect of poorly hidden unrequited schoolboy crushes on burgeoning friendships with straight, straight dudes. And lately it was turning out than an actual real-time, face-to-face, IRL friendship with a genuine flesh-and-blood human being and whatnot, was a commodity that Matt – f4rr3ll to some, digital god to many, and former Emperor of his very own nerdy, solitary little paradise – actually quite highly valued. Who knew.

 

So Matt didn’t want to call Holly.

 

Despite the fact – self-admitted tendency toward paranoia aside – he was seriously beginning to suspect a couple of things that had been left out of the recipe weren’t entirely accidents; how exactly one would fill the second layer with ricotta without being told what goes in the _first_ layer yet was a mystery for the ages.

 

Besides, it wasn’t lost on him that Holly’s previously absurd-sounding prediction of domestic ‘emergency’ had indeed come to pass. And between arguing with John and daring to challenge the almighty Lucy for a Scrabulous definition of _xylyl_ this week (It means ‘containing the molecule for xylene’, Farrell, jeez aren’t geeks supposed to know this stuff??), he was getting sort of fed up with how everyone in this family, even when they were wrong (It’s a word SEGMENT, Genarro, a WORD should stand by itself) …was somehow _always_ right.

 

One hand was liberally covered in streaks of redolently garlicky red sauce, and the other was covered in an oven mitt. Matt blew his bangs out of his eyes and flattened the recipe out on the counter, ignoring the way his splayed fingers smudged the word _sautee_ with yet another smear of brightly coloured sauce, and started to read the whole thing over for the eleventy-gazillionth time.

 

_…Shit._

 

“…been working for just over a week now,” Matt found himself explaining, sometime after accepting his inevitable defeat and ditching the oven mitt in favour of the phone, and subsequently being instructed to ‘slow down and start from the beginning’ while Holly dug through her old recipe box.

 

“And sometimes I tend to get a little sleepy, and so maybe I turned my music up a little loud…I guess I forget sometimes when I get into it what time it is, and sure, I know there’s no such thing as the _ideal_ housemate, but that doesn’t mean I want to act like some kind of…of parasitic Goldeneye or a—”

  
“I’m sorry?”

 

The things you could learn from searching the internet for replacement copies of vintage Nintendo 64 games, after your original collection had been blown up by assassins, was frankly quite staggering.

 

And sometimes really boring. But Matt felt like now that he’d mentioned it, he had to try and at least explain.

 

“Oh. See, the Goldeneye is this duck species,” he said quickly, “that lays its eggs in the nest of another female when nesting spaces are limited? But the behaviour is a risky one – evolutionarily speaking – because one duck can only handle so much, and if the clutch dies then both mothers lose their eggs and that’s bad for the whole colony. And, I mean, John’s got enough eggs in his nest to deal with, if you know what I mean, and when he gets home at night the last thing I want to be is—”

 

“Matt?” Holly interrupted.

 

Oh, right.

 

“Sorry. You asked about the argument, not the…ducks. But I just…”

 

Just what? ‘Hate discussing anything that even remotely touches on my relationship with John with you, because it’s not only supremely disconcerting hanging out with the ex of the guy whose pants I’d kind of like to see the inside of, but also because you seem to somehow know it, _and_ think it’s the funniest thing since Abbott and Costello broke up’?

 

“…The argument was stupid,” he finally said, truthfully, “and when I try to think about how to explain it, it just seems to make even less sense, and I get that John’s job is…well _you_ probably know what it’s like better than I do, right? John never talks about it, really…and hell, nobody has to tell _me_ that sharing your space is hard, when you’ve gotten used to being alone. I mean, hello, practically a recluse over here. Or I was. Before. And I…now I’m getting kind of used to _not_ being an anti-social shut-in these days, you know? And it’s…well. All I know is I just don’t want to fight any more. …And that I really, really suck at lasagna.”

 

Holly was laughing at him. Of course.

 

“I’m sorry, I’m just not even sure _I_ get what the argument was about, and I’m …just trying to figure out how to apologize, here,” Matt said, hoping the conversation would return to the lasagna debacle he was literally up to his eyeballs in.

 

“Trust me,” Holly replied simply, “so is John.”

 

Matt sighed and looked around himself, thinking if McClane were to come down right now and see his kitchen looking like it had been hit by a tomato and spinach WMD, apologies would probably be the furthest thing from his mind.

 

“…But he’s been working on that one for fifty-two years, so I wouldn’t count on tonight being the night,” Holly concluded.

 

Matt laughed a little now too, trying to put as much sympathy as he could into it.

 

“Did I mention I really suck at this lasagna thing? I’m a mess. And I mean that metaphorically _and_ literally. I’m completely covered in…wow. How did you do it? I mean with two kids running around, and one of those kids being Lucy— I mean, no, seriously, you should see the kitchen. Or maybe you shouldn’t. _John_ shouldn’t…”

 

“Matt?” Holly said again, a little less sharply this time.

 

“…Yeah?”

 

“Here’s what you’re going to do, okay? Take the lasagna,” she began, and Matt looked around the destruction-zone of the kitchen frantically for a moment, wondering if he should be grabbing a pen. “… and put it in the garbage. Then go to the freezer and take the pizza out.”

 

Matt liked the sound of this plan. He liked the sound of this plan a lot. Except for one small detail.

 

“…There isn’t any pizza in there.”

 

Matt knew this for a fact. He was the one who did the grocery shopping after all. Although not wanting to invite any more jokes, or assumptions, or whatever they were about living with John at his expense, he decided to keep that part to himself.

 

“You have to check behind the box of toaster waffles and the bag of frozen vegetables he uses for an ice pack when his shoulder is bothering him. That’s where he hides it.”

 

“Son of a bitch,” Matt swore, when he had the box in hand.

 

Alright. So sometimes it was sort of awesome how everyone in this family was somehow _always_ right.

 

Holly was laughing at him again, which was less awesome. But when she started talking again, her tone was kind.

 

“And then you’re going to go upstairs and tell John everything you just told me. …Maybe minus the part about the ducks.”

 

Matt was smiling wryly now, and from the sound of it, Holly was too.

 

“No awkward, rambling Nature Channel tangents,” he said, in confirmation. “Got it.”

 

“Good.”

 

Lo and behold, they’d made it through the call without Holly saying anything to hack Matt’s carefully constructed mental security program.

 

 “Hey, um. Holly? …Thanks.”

 

“Sure, Matt. Any time.”

 

“Okay,” Matt said, not quite sure how else to signal the end of the conversation. But in a second or two, Holly took care of that too.

 

“Oh and Matt?” She sounded like she might be trying not to laugh again. “Once you’ve got the pizza in the oven and you’re ready to go up there…You can just leave all your messy clothes downstairs.”

 

And the frantic spluttering that would have been Matt’s best attempt at a response was cut off by the smug droning of the dial tone in his ear.

 

**

 

“Yeah.”

 

Matt sighed out a breath before he reached for the knob. The single syllable was probably all he was going to get in return for his tentative tapping at McClane’s bedroom door, but the tone sounded serene enough to tell him it was probably safe to come in. He hoped.

 

“There’s this new thing,” Matt said, when he did. “It’s called _knocking_.”

 

Matt demonstrated again on the already-open door and threw McClane a little half-a-smile to show the joke meant he was over it. He prepared for one of those patented, intimidation-guaranteed McClane Brow-raises (™) that were the usual reaction to his attempts at humour, but when he looked, John was already half-smiling back.

 

So far, so not-shot-on-sight. Cool.

 

McClane looked tired. He was sprawled out on the bed, looking like he’d given up halfway through getting undressed – he still had his pants on and everything (probably for the best) but his shoes and socks were missing and he’d taken off his shirt, leaving just the old school white undershirt Matt was reasonably sure nobody but McClane still wore in this century. One brawny arm was stretched up, the back of his hand resting heavily on his forehead, like he’d been lying there with it thrown over his eyes instead of troubling with the blinds, and could only be bothered expending the energy to lift it a bare couple of inches for a conversation.

 

John’s gaze moved down over him, taking him in, and, okay, there went that eyebrow he’d been waiting for. Matt looked down too, holding the front of his t-shirt away from himself so he could fully appreciate the same spectacularly disastrous view McClane must be getting.

 

Maybe Holly had been at least partly right about his clothes. Again.

 

Matt pulled his t-shirt off over his head and used it to try and wipe off the rest of the stuff still streaking his wrists and forearms – it was nothing better than a dishrag now anyway. He kept his eyes pointed down at what he was doing, so he could avoid unwise things like imagining John’s gaze lingering on his skin.

 

When he looked back up, it felt like it took John a second to meet his eye. Yup. There he went imagining things again. Matt cleared his throat.

 

“So. I’m supposed to tell you that I can’t even remember the rest of what we were fighting about, and I’m done being mad, and it would be really cool if it could be over now.”

 

Those eyes were definitely focused on his face now. John sat there for a minute, watching Matt’s expression quietly and looking like he was weighing his response in his head.

 

Matt stood there, feeling like he was awaiting some sort of sentencing verdict, and forcing himself not to squirm. Then McClane apparently decided not to share whatever was happening up there in the good old stoic chrome-dome, because he just nodded.

 

Nodding wasn’t exactly John speaking to him again, but not speaking meant not arguing. He’d take it.

 

 “…And dinner’s going to be ready in about twenty,” Matt added, and turned toward the door.

 

“’Kay,” John said finally, then he groaned a little. Matt turned back to see him swinging his legs over the side of the bed and stiffly sitting up on the edge. Then he winced, and rolled his shoulder.

 

“Shit,” Matt said, squinching his nose up in a way he hoped conveyed sympathy. “You want your ice pack?” Vegetables, whatever.

 

“Nah.”  John held up a hand in a gesture for Matt to come further into the room, and then moved over on the bed to give him space to sit down, once he got there.

 

So much for this being over now.

 

Matt checked his hands for leftover traces of sauce before he sat down and ran his fingers through his hair.

 

It felt like pulling his shirt over his head had rumpled his ’do into impossible configurations that would make M.C. Escher proud. When he gave up on sorting it out, in favour of rubbing his palms nervously on his jeans, McClane took over, reaching up to comb surprisingly gentle fingers through the steam-tangled mess. Matt just hoped there wasn’t anything like bits of onion or mushroom in it, and tried not to shiver at the touch.

 

“Talked to Holly, huh?” John asked, just as gently. The close, warm sound made him go straight from shivers, to feeling sort of flushed all over. Man, this crush thing was getting out of control.

 

“Guess they don’t call you ‘Detective’ for nothing,” Matt quipped drily, trying to keep his own voice steady. “What gave me away?”

 

“It’s not you,” John said slowly. “Holly started dating again a pretty long time before I did. I think she mighta felt guilty, started fancying herself quite the little matchmaker. She tried this trick out on the last guy I started seeing, too.”

 

Okay. What? No. Too many things were happening at the same time for the processors in Matt’s head to handle.

 

His brain had barely dealt with being in McClane’s bedroom, with his shirt off, sitting _on the bed_. It was still embroiled somewhere in the process of getting over the fingers – John’s fingers! In his _hair_ – and so it took some time before the word-parts of all the McClane-stimuli competing for space in his mental RAM could sink in.

 

Seeing? ...“ _Guy_?”

 

“Yeah. Couple years ago now,” John answered, and Matt belatedly realized he’d said that second part out loud. “Listen, kid…”

 

“Matt.” At least he wasn’t so far gone he couldn’t correct John on that score, it was getting pretty automatic, of late.

 

“Yeah, that’s the one,” John agreed with a smirk that said it wasn’t going to be the last time, either. “Look, I’m sorry I busted in on ya, and jumped to unfair conclusions about your music.”

 

“…Sure.” Matt was still feeling a little slow. Now that he was all caught up, his imagination was busily jumping to some conclusions of its own again, and the sudden freedom of realizing maybe he was allowed, was making him slightly dizzy.

 

 “I’m…did you say ‘seeing’? Did you just _apologize_??”

 

“Maybe. Think you could give a guy born before 1972 a chance not to be _totally useless_?”

 

Matt was pretty sure he was staring, but he was finally back on track enough to get that McClane’s response could have been meant for either, or both, of his questions.

 

He blinked.

 

“If you and I are ‘seeing’ each other…then I can think of at least seven ways for you to make yourself very, very useful. And that’s just between now and when dinner’s on the table.”

 

John laughed, and then those hands were back and touching him again. This time it was a thumb, rubbing along his cheek. Possibly because there was a smudge of sauce there, there was no way for Matt to be sure.

 

“So what was my very complicated, very mysteriously lacking in some key instructions, all-time favourite recipe this time around?”

 

“I knew it!” Matt exclaimed, making a little fist of victory in his lap. “Nobody leaves out how high to set the oven by _mistake_!”

 

Well at least he’d gotten _something_ right. Score one for Team Farrell. Of course, it was still about five-katrillion to one Team Genarro-McClane. But it was a start.

 

John chuckled, and Matt pulled himself back from his inner touch-down dance, remembering that John had actually asked him a question. John was still touching his face though, and now he was even moving closer, which was understandably pretty distracting.

 

“…I was trying to—” he began, but now John was turning Matt’s face aside.

 

“Shhh,” John said in his ear, and the hot breath on his neck made the hair there prickle and stand at attention. Then he nuzzled his nose over it, and Matt gave in to the all-over shiver this time. “Don’t tell me.”

 

“Oh,” Matt replied, realizing some of Holly’s ‘old family recipe’ must have somehow ended up smeared under his jaw, “… _Oh_.” And the second one came out more of a gasp, as John found the place where Matt’s pulse was beating, pretty rapidly now, in his throat. Then he put his mouth there – hot, and soft, and open – and _sucked_.

 

Oh Jesus, oh holy shit, oh WOW.

 

“Lasagna, huh?” John guessed, licking his lips mischievously, once he was done with his little taste test.

 

Seriously? They were still talking about _dinner_?

 

“About that,” Matt said, when he’d gotten a handle on his voice again. “No, yeah, not anymore. Now it’s frozen Meat Lovers Deluxe.”

 

“My favourite.”

 

John grinned wolfishly, eyes flicking over him like he was looking for more smudges of tomato sauce as an appetizer. But Matt was ready to skip to the main course.

 

He lifted up a hand, because he could, and put it on John’s chest – just where the silvering chest hair peeked teasingly out at him over the top of John’s soft, worn wifebeater.

 

“I think this is the part where you stop torturing me, and start kissing me, now.”

 

John’s answering chuckle held intentions that made warmth curl in the bottom of Matt’s stomach.

 

“Maybe you’re right.”

 

Then John stopped chuckling and leaned forward, and Matt leaned forward the rest of the way. And then he tilted up a bit to fit the heat of their mouths together…and Matt thought he might come right out of his skin.

 

It shouldn’t have felt like this, really. It should have been a messy, garlicky anti-climax – and maybe it was. But that’s not how it felt. It felt like the syrupy sweet resolution to a whole lot of jumping to exactly the right conclusions, and it felt like months of daydreaming and fantasies and hopeless hoping coming true.

 

It was the firm but careful pressure of John’s lips, and the softness of the tip of his tongue, and Matt discovering that the old cliché of ‘fireworks going off behind eyelids’ wasn’t as far-fetched and cheesy as he’d once thought. It was the surprising electricity and fire of John’s hands finding his skin and making him think that losing his t-shirt had totally been the right call, too.

 

It all made Matt want to climb into John’s lap, and urge him down on the bed, and start suggesting things in his ear that Matt figured it was probably way too early for.

 

And then he swung a leg over John’s knees and climbed into his lap anyway. Heck, they had at least fifteen minutes to make good use of, before the buzzer went off on Holly’s secret recipe.

 

Yeah. There was no ‘maybe’ about it. If this was what it was going to be like being right all the time, Matt probably wasn’t going to mind becoming part of this family after all.

 

 

**THE END**


End file.
